Monday, March 14, 2022

Let There Be Light!

The Enlightenment, or “L’Age des Lumieres”:  Spectacle, Theatre, and the Imagination

Introduction: Theatre of Performance and the Theatre of Place

“And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the eighteenth century.” (Foucault 39)

Kant has written that a separation exists between the private and the public use of reason; the private use being that which is bound by the rules of our station or role in life. Publicly, we have a right to reason freely as individuals, whereas within our role, we need to suppress this reason to comply with the standards set down by how a person of our position is supposed to act. Aphra Behn’s “Emperor of the Moon” and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey subvert this idea, showing that not only can the private use of reason be dangerous especially when bound by the requirements of role, but the private use of imagination and emotion (not bound by a public display) can actually supersede Reason and lead to a better, more objective use of Reason. This is albeit a complex dynamic with many caveats to pull apart, but, as seen in both these examples, we see a rupture in the standard Kantian Enlightenment narrative that had been gaining ground throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.   From the beginning of the period in 1687 when “Emperor of the Moon” was first performed to the end in 1798 when Northanger Abbey was first published, we see alternatives to the typical Enlightenment narrative.

              It is not only dangerous for a person to be left to themselves with tools which are limiting to the particular application, it is also dangerous to rely on public use of reason to always be reliable or immune from manipulation. “The Emperor of the Moon” was performed a century before Kant wrote his essay “What is Enlightenment?”, so clearly, it is not so much going against Kant as much as hitting on an alternative early on. Was Behn also veering off from science and acting/writing as a scientist? Her work shows us that she had understood science well and could not only write about current scientific discoveries, but also could apply these discoveries in a way that expressed her competency. In the play, the virtuoso Baliardo was certainly claiming to be using reason in accordance with his role. Could we then be seeing of glimpse of Foucault’s idea of modernity in Behn’s work? Through Behn, the spectator is asked to see glimpses or vignettes of the ability of individuals (either as a group or singular but in the case of theatre spectatorship, this would constitute both) to use a form of reason distanced from role and the public. The outward passions and political displays of spectacle can be used with intent and being unaware due to the necessity of one’s role can lead to not only ridicule and blindsiding, but inevitably, farce. Behn, in essence, is criticizing empty spectacle and spectacle which serves to manipulate without individual use of Reason.

In “Emperor of the Moon”, Behn makes use of performative space to accomplish her objectives. She makes use of the spectators to serve as a “captive audience” enlisted voluntarily to forward these objectives (as one would do in a blind experiment, or a focus group). She is using her power and role as playwright to show how the private “role” of Baliardo can lead him astray. Interestingly enough, Behn’s role is public and involves consumption by the public. Behn is satirizing the very theatre she is creating using a form of metatextuality (the play is a parody of Dryden’s “Albion and Abanius”). Is she following the standards of her role? While this is debatable, what should be emphasized is that the play itself (her creation) speaks indirectly on the problem of public display of spectacle, and it is her use of reason and the imagination required to create a literary work that enables this to happen. Could we also be seeing the playwright becoming a novelist? Is her private use of reason and its ability to speak metaphorically about her work in essence a novelistic technique at a time when the concept of the novel is still in the works? If we look at Behn’s timeline, this play was written right at the time when she was starting to immerse herself into fiction, and Oroonoko was published the following year. Mannheimer has argued:

“Behn explores these contrasts ultimately implies that the most internal, subjective forms of mental imaging -the kinds of enraptured fantasizing usually associated with acts of reading-can give rise to the most externally demonstrative forms of spectacle. Moreover by thus obscuring the boundaries between public and empirical on the one hand and the empathic and private on the other, The Emperor of the Moon begins to “regender” these modes of experience.”(Mannheimer 39)

 It is a very early modern example of the individual coming to the forefront of thought. It is interesting to note that the empirical is paired with the public; something that Kant emphasizes in his description of the Enlightenment. Could Behn be saying that the Enlightenment is causing us to forget about the private?

              If we compare “The Emperor of the Moon” to Austen’s Northanger Abbey, in Austen’s work we see a privately owned ancient architectural space being used to also show an alternative to the prevailing Enlightenment narrative. The role of the space has been changed, and it is no longer used as an abbey by the clergy. Catherine’s imagination and her familiarity with Gothic tropes through novel reading aids her in her ability to indirectly reason through the very realistic trap she was ensnared into: John Thorpe’s lies and General Tilney’s greed were recognized by Catherine (of course, contrasted with Miss Thorpe’s inability to recognize Captain Tilney’s seductive manipulations). General Tilney used Catherine opportunistically and gave her preference over all others due to Thorpe’s lies from the outset. The general wished to obtain her hand in marriage for his son so that the money (her supposed wealth) could go towards maintaining their non-ancestral estate property. Behn and Austen using their writing to subvert the Enlightenment narrative is not pure chance. Both works had one foot into the Baroque and Gothic/Romantic, respectively, so it makes sense that for both emotion and its imaginative potential or trappings would be a source of inquiry to be both questioned and pieced apart. As Ros Ballister points out:

“The importance of a myth of female readership for prose narrative -especially love narrative or stories of amorous intrigue- had already been established in prose fiction before the late 1680’s.” (Mannheimer 42)

Catherine is in essence scolded by Henry Tilney for not adhering to Enlightenment standards, just like everyone else. To Henry, conformity to the principles of Reason and trust in their fellow countrymen was enough that the logic of her musings was held into question. Was Catherine exhibiting the use of reason through her role? No, she wasn’t, but she was using her reason through a medium that was typically the realm of women i.e. novel reading. Was this in fact her role? To read novels because she was expected to be entertained by them? Another debate without an answer. Women and novels were criticized during this period, so to say that this would be her “expected” role would not give any clarity. For Catherine, her role within a marginalized group i.e. women allowed and even may have required this subversion of the Kantian Enlightenment structuring. What cannot be denied is that women were digesting the Gothic novel at a frenetic pace, Catherine being no exception, and the popularity of the novel gives it the agency to be read. These novels became a common language not only for women, but for some men such as Henry, at the very least to be ridiculed and sensationalized.

              Kant’s exit strategy or “way out” (Foucault 34) through the Enlightenment simply doesn’t work when the individual is marginalized and forced outside of the system of control (or role) for whatever reason, be it the feminine realm, servitude, class, or race. Outsiders to the system would subvert the system.  Outsiders in many cases have the upper hand as seen in the lives of servants, such as described within Gillian Russell’s essay “Keeping Place:  Servants, Theater, and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth century Britain.”:

“The servants thus occupied a position on the boundaries of all kinds of social formations-between the family and the public world beyond , between intimacy and impersonality, between mastery and subordination, between the rulers and the ruled (often this is complicated by the reversal of conventional gender roles in the case of mistress and male servant)-a position that combined both power and abjection.” (Russell 23)

Outsiders serve as liminal placeholders and observers of multi-perspective viewpoints. They have the ability to use covert techniques and make use of their hidden advantages to succeed at their objectives.

Artists and writers were also liminal figures, as were women of all classes. Their abjection and both mental and bodily separation from the norm became their ability to evade a prescribed standard.

“Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors.” (Foucault 35)

Behn, a Royalist female playwright who constructs temporary worlds and vignettes, like curiosity cabinets that require Behn’s individual framing, speaks on the manner of “improper peeping” and places Baliardo into a space where he is in fact voluntarily acting. She is calling forth a plea towards propriety and manners in the midst of the virtuoso’s enthrallment with science and the tools of science. Contrast what Behn does with Austen and the character of Catherine: a young female character is plunged into a Gothic romance by virtue of an old abbey and her imagination, then called out for “improper peeping” when she enters the mother’s room (after being informed by Miss Tilney that the room is off limits). So, what is the common denominator between these two examples? The tool that is used.

              -In Behn, a telescope is used to spy into the emperor’s closet as a form of political intelligence.

-In Austen, a Gothic novel is used and its various lenses as a form of personal protection in the face of opportunism and abuse.

In Behn, the telescope is called out and proved to be a limiting, invasive, dangerous tool, and in Austen, the Gothic novel ends up unveiling the truth; the first being a tool of science, whereas the second is the tool of the imagination. Therefore, the imagination becomes a more reliable tool in the ability to reason.

              Neither example shows that reason has been relinquished. Rather, they both show that proper and skilled use of individual reason is the answer, away from the ambiguous and troubling concept of role.

“The Emperor of the Moon”:  Manners, Bodies, and the Ownership of Space

Aphra Behn problematizes Kant 100 years before he even wrote his essay on the Enlightenment. Behn creates for herself a liminal role-neither woman, nor writer, neither actor, nor spectator. She mixed the public with the private in her play to show not only that they are interdependent, but that so much depends on the connections between people and their perceptions.  By using “anti-spectacular epistemologies”, Behn “restages debased spectacle in order to contain and defuse it.” (Coppola 1).

              At a time when the political landscape in England is at a crisis point, Behn’s configures her play in order to call a halt to the trajectory away from rational mindfulness and towards the credulity of an entire population of people. What she recognized was that the science of curiosity that was so much in fashion was at fault and the spectacles that were being performed in the streets were being taken in without skepticism, thus affecting the political balance and the strength of the monarchy.

“As a committed Tory and a canny professional author, Behn is attempting to identify, stimulate, and ultimately retrain a troubling appetite for uncritical wonder in her audience, one which traverses all domains of culture, aesthetic, scientific, and especially political.” (Coppola 2)

 The play was composed during the Tory Reaction, but then wasn’t performed until the end of the reign of James II. So, while it is speaking about events from the past, the play itself reflects what had happened to public discourse and display in those intervening years since. In essence, Behn wants critical thinking and agency brought back to each individual, so that the collective can tell the difference between empty spectacle vs. spectacle meant to sway the people towards a political stance.

              The character Baliardo has lost this ability to discern spectacle. He is ironically blinded by his spy glass, both to the meaning of what he is seeing and to the consequences of the act of spying. Behn is turning the light on to the social abuses that were occurring, invasion of privacy being one of those abuses, thus calling into question what is the meaning of ownership, both in space and body. Baliardo doesn’t have access to the big picture, yet insists upon reading the signs anyway.  His family calls attention to these signs and to their absurdity in the larger scope of things

Behn’s life story was one of ambiguity and apparent struggle to keep the facts of her life unclear. Behn may have been married, yet we are not sure. She was a spy herself, so of course the facts around this profession would be inherently muddled. Behn seemed to be hyperaware of celebrity and the dangers of having her privacy breached. So, anything that Behn put out to the public was in a sense “on display” and scrutinized and could affect how she was perceived and her works accepted by the public, making it of vital importance that her works stood alone. We cannot say very much about her life that has been proven conclusively, but it appears that this idea of privacy was something important to Behn, and since so much of her biography is obscured, we could conclude that she was highly protective of her privacy. “The Emperor of the Moon” was in essence designed to show that the tools of science should not be used for nefarious ends; the right to privacy being the one thing that individuals need to be able to keep. This is coming from a woman who is writing about historically gender specific fields such as astronomy and physics. Appler has argued that

“Behn’s playful treatment of science concepts for mixed gender audiences aligns her work with scientific material by early female practitioners of science, such as Margaret Cavendish and Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil.” (Appler 28)

Behn combining science and ethics in this play shows that Reason shouldn’t be performed in a vacuum without an ethical component.  Behn seems to want to express that science cannot be explored, studied, and utilized without being mindful of the consequences. To Behn, there is a difference between using the mind and encroaching on the rights of the body and space. The character Baliardo brings to mind court gossip and intrigue, of course since only wise politicians use their telescope as a “statesman’s peeping hole”. Behn is calling into question those boundaries; keeping these boundaries up and established can only allow science to flourish and individuals to keep their sovereignty through the changes that are being undertaken in society. Or, as Mannheimer writes,

“When it came to seem that the movements of the individual mind might contain more “truth” than outward passions or political displays, the newer medium came to seem more relevant, more revealing.” (Mannheimer 40).

Thus, allowing new societal paradigms to form and become established. Concealment would preserve and keep reputation and decrease chances of people being “misread” and so discarded as being unsuitable for polite society.

In Behn’s play we also see a public display of the privacy of Baliardo. This display is only seen as right because they are attempting to expose his nefarious habits. But, Behn does this in a clever way to not only expose publicly the farce of his fascination with the telescope, she also sexualizes Baliardo into becoming a voyeur. Something quite similar to a movement that will occur in the future: the wide- ranging popularity of the novel and, in particular, the Gothic novel. The novel is a safe way to peer because these are fictional narratives. We aren’t peering into others’ lives so much as spectating some hypothetical scenarios. Baliardo is in his own head thinking he is peering into the Emperor of the Moon’s closet, while in actuality he is looking into a real person’s closet. Baliardo as voyeur subverts the power dynamic and, in turn, opens it up indiscriminately to the gaze of many. Baliardo of course gets pleasure out of doing so, and the fascination and awe that it produces encourages his continual breaching of boundaries. This idea of disrupted spaces was a new one once the telescope had been introduced and the attitude toward empiricism needed adjustment so that it wasn’t used in a way to hurt others. During the late seventeenth century, there was a shift from a culture where everything is public (court) to one where the private is valued. Although during the early modern period, women participated in the public realms such as politics, law, religion, and economics, space was still gendered, and Behn seems to be saying that if privacy is breached for those who have their agency and reputation at stake the most, then empiricism cannot end well on this path.

Behn makes clever use of her drama, so that we see the interplay between the breach of the private and the exposure to the public, all through the character of Baliardo. In the end, she does show that all of this hiding and revealing that is taking place is in essence meaningless, for Baliardo believes he is only seeing people on the moon and the constellations. Behn turns the entire play into an empty farce by the end, a resplendent pageantry, yet still a farce.

Northanger Abbey: The Secret Chamber and the Darkness

Moving more than one hundred years into the future, we see a different sort of voyeurism within Austen’s novel. The private is emphasized even more within Austen’s narrative to the point where a sort of tyrannical disavowal of agency occurs concerning Catherine. From Behn to Austen, we go from a comic drama of exposure to a Gothic parody of the evil that lurks within ancient architectural space. In this case, a young woman is seen as a voyeur. She is also using story and narrative fantasy to encourage her irrational thinking by needing desperately to enter the dead Mrs. Tilney’s bedchamber. One could say it was merely her curiosity that encouraged this, but we could look further to see that it was the sublime. Catherine is attracted to the horror. It brings her pleasure. Again, a character is disrupting space to breach privacy. This time the privacy of a dead woman is at stake and the family’s attempts to protect her are seen attempts to cover up something by Catherine.

If we focus on the accusations of Henry Tilney towards Catherine, we can see that he is following the Kantian principles of Enlightenment thinking:

“What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live in. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding your own sense of probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.” (Austen 204)

What is most ironic here is that it is Henry who isn’t observing what is happening around him, not Catherine. It is Catherine who spends all her time observing her surroundings. It could be that this is what she is best a and her curiosity leads her to explore and investigate what she needed to explore in order to come to the “right” conclusions. Although, in the end, what mattered was that Catherine disobeyed the General, Miss Tilney, and Henry when she was told not to explore that part of the abbey. Catherine did not obey the authority, so she is the one to blame for her inability to reason, which of course is problematized by the end of the novel. Like Behn’s play, Austen’s novel is meant to educate the reader, as Henry Tilney educates Catherine in the use of irony. Doesn’t matter that Tilney is actually fooled by irony in the end, he still teaches her how not to see the world in such a literal, straightforward manner throughout the novel. As Terry Castle has written: Austen is using Northanger Abbey as “an instrument of the Enlightenment” (Schaub 1), the question in the end is: Why does Austen use the Gothic genre the way she does in her own narrative? Yes, it is a parody, but it is also instructional and without the information coming from the Gothic elements we would not be instructed at all. Both Henry and Catherine need to learn from each other, and it is the blaming of Catherine and her immediate removal from the abbey that shows that her transgressions have not been allowed due to her marginalization and General Tilney’s inability to get past this blame. Henry learns through Catherine’s suffering and being cast aside, just like what would happen in a Gothic novel. The reader would learn second hand through the characters.

              Is Austen saying that obeying authority is problematic when it comes to reason? Austen seems to be saying that authority isn’t always right, so it is better to trust your own judgment and in essence your own intuition. Even figures of authority who you do trust could be deceived themselves.  She could also be saying that women especially need not be afraid to trust themselves and what they are feeling or seeing. That is the subtext that is running through the entire novel. When she was asked to go driving with Mr. Thorpe, she should have trusted herself. When she tells Miss Thorpe that they should be more careful, she should have trusted herself that Miss Thorpe’s naivete may get them into trouble. When she questioned Henry about whether he should be courting a girl without money, she should have trusted herself. In the end though, it all worked out for the couple, as Austen novels tend to do, but we cannot deny that Austen had been schooling us all along through Gothic conventions. It is the Gothic convention and fear or terror that signal our bodies and minds that we are in danger, even when that danger is fictional at source. It is not always within the light do we find the truth. Sometimes we need to brave the darkness in order to find our way through in our imagination.

              Paul Morrison has argued convincingly that it is the ideology of the Heimlich that Henry is calling forth in his speech, and it is apparent that what is at stake here in this novel is not the comfort of Enlightenment thought, but a combination of both the light of the contemporary English combined with the carceral economies and dark spaces of the Gothic.  Morrison writes,

“I shall argue for the presence of an “unheimlich” movement, both within Northanger Abbey and between Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho, subversive of the oppositions here/there, now/then, light/dark, open/closed, the various binarisms that structure his celebration of a “country like this.” (Morrison 2)

If we examine what is present within the text and what is not present and missing, we could get closer to why Tilney’s authority within his speech is both flawed and incomplete. The abbey itself is a product of the past. The abbey is a symbol of past authority. The abbey itself has combined what he speaks of as “English” but it is covered by darkness and illusion. What is problematized in this novel is that idea that not everything should be or can be en-light-ened. In order to see the light, you need the darkness. Modernism disrupts this line of thought by showing us that there is chaos and by attempting a containment of this dark unpredictability, you have already lost the battle.

“What grows in the garden is always a small, consciously selected sample on what might be grown there…An Enlightenment in the social improvement of man became, by degrees, a belief in the perfectibility of social order.” (Scott 92-93)

James Scott argues that social engineering seems at odds with our experience of modernity. The world being in flux and at the point of potential profound, vast change is not conducive to the solid structure called for in Enlightenment principles. Henry wishes for a world that is easy to quantify and delineate because it gives him a sense of stability and that we can rely on this social order to not contain corruption. Catherine knows better, and to her and to James Scott, managing society and expecting to act by this construct “seems rather like trying to manage a whirlwind.” (Scott 93) Catherine embraces the chaos and uncertainty, welcoming sublime terror with open arms and even searches it out.

              In the end though, she is blamed for transgressing the boundaries of the abbey: its dark halls, its hidden secrets, its ability to cover up fault and tyranny. Catherine knows and understands this potential. The question is: why does no one else spot it? It may have something to do with her being an outsider and borderline unremarkable: Catherine was not a heroine, not neglected, not poor, nor handsome, does not have a rich, neglected father, her father never locked up his daughters, her mother did not have a poor constitution, not beautiful or gifted in a physical sense, she didn’t play with girl’s things, did not gather flowers, played with boys chiefly for pleasure and mischief, and she was occasionally stupid. She wasn’t formed to be a Gothic heroine. So, putting her into a Gothic abbey shouldn’t put her in danger, or should it? This is where it gets muddled and tricky. The danger lies not within the history of the abbey, but it’s present. They are all “still” within the abbey, living and dying, working, socializing, eating, and drinking. What makes a difference is this Enlightenment thought that pervades its corridors, which does not allow for the darkness to escape.

Miranda Fricker: Blame and Hermeneutical Injustice and Why an Abbey, or an Empty Spectacle.

The Kantian Enlightenment narrative attempted a hollowing out of the bits and pieces of cloudy thought. It asked for clarity and light to be brought to those things that still were shrouded by uncertainty. It wanted to brush under anything that didn’t agree with its concept of Reason and why things must be organized and structured into these ways of thought. Catherine is blamed by more than one person for violated the privacy of the abbey. She crossed boundaries to find out the truth. Was it correct that she was blamed? The abbey did and does contain secrets, for that is what an abbey represents. Miranda Fricker has pieced apart six requirements for justified blame:

First, the blamed party must be blameworthy.

Second, blame must be proportionate to the wrongdoing.

Third, Blame should be appropriately contained in its proper remit, both in terms of time and relationships.

Fourth, blame must be expressed using proper ethical levels and intent must be considered.

Fifth, blame must be fitted to the amount of offender’s entitlement

Sixth, it cannot be considered as an aspect of no-fault moral responsibility. (Fricker 168-170)

 

In Catherine’s case when she was scolded for transgressing the mother’s bedchamber, she was to blame in some cases, but not others. In one sense, she was not given all the information and curiosity was peaked. She was also left alone there without a chaperone. She did not, as Henry seems to think, have malicious intent in entering the room. Henry had accused her of thinking unmentionable evils about his father, which goes beyond her actual intent of being curious about his mother. Even if she considered these as possibilities doesn’t mean she actually thought these things were true. Which of course comes into the rules of Enlightenment and what is acceptable. Catherine should not have been blamed for this event, just as much as she should not have been thrown out of the abbey at night time to make her way home alone. These examples both show misplaced blame towards someone who is not blameworthy. Fricker writes,

“Perhaps this is simply because there are indeed socially prominent styles of blame that are bad. Those, for instance, that spring from a censorious habit of finding fault, or from projected guilt or shame, form moralistic high mindedness, naked vengeful drive, or the simple cruelty of seeking satisfaction from making someone feel bad.” (Fricker 168)

In Catherine’s case, I do believe it was misplaced guilt and shame: two feelings that were “brushed under the carpet” and seen as not acceptable. They are dark feelings filled with the grief that has not passed, and all three family members were exhibiting within the narrative repression of guilt and shame; General Tilney of course being the worst of the three.

              Why does Catherine not speak up? Why does she allow it all to happen? Is she feeling guilt?

Catherine feels at one with the house. She understands that she is partially to blame for falling prey to the sublime, so she accepts the blame given to her, being trained to do so by Gothic novels: she shouldn’t have passed into that side of the abbey. It was in essence her fault. Catherine speaks the language of the Gothic novel. Catherine does not possess the language needed to defend herself in the language used by the Tilneys.  Catherine does not speak in the language of the prevailing patriarchal Enlightenment narrative, so she attempts to express herself on her own terms in a way she knows best. Catherine isn’t “stupid”. She just speaks a language that some do not know how to speak or have even tried to speak (an example is John Thorpe giving up on reading Camilla and she absolutely cannot speak or communicate her boundaries to him). This is an example of hermeneutical injustice, or

“when there is unequal hermeneutical participation with respect to some significant area(s) of social experience, members of the disadvantaged group are hermeneutically marginalized. The notion of marginalization is a moral-political one indicating subordination and exclusion from some practice that would have value for the participant.” (Fricker 99)

Catherine has been excluded from being able to express not only her feelings, but express what she is understanding by observing the environment and social situation she is placed within. She uses the language of the Gothic to express herself, which is understood only in terms of its silliness and non-reality, when really, she is using the techniques of a writer and novelist to bring the truth to the surface of things (novels being the realm of woman at that time). She places her narrative within the abbey, which is the key point. Henry places her in the position of voyeur and chastises her as Behn had done to Baliardo, without understanding the distance in communication between them until later. Catherine is made a spectacle of, but is being placed into a marginalized position without clear voice (or clear as in enlightened). Catherine has not been given an equal footing within the abbey.

Conclusion: The Legacy of Behn and Austen

Can conscious, deliberate spectacle ever be used in accordance with rightful blame and hermeneutical justice? What have the efforts of Behn and Austen brought to modern discourse? Anyone examining the use of pageantry and spectacle in the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession would recognize the efforts to redeem the use of spectacle in performance in a marginalized voiceless group who could potentially be shut down. The women marched calmly (estimated to be between 5,000 to 10,000) keeping a military formation even while being “spit upon, slapped in the face, and insulted by jeers and obscene language too vile to print or repeat.” (https://www.history.com/news/this-huge-womens-march-drowned-out-a-presidential-inauguration-in-1913). Two hundred people were trampled that day and 169 women were arrested for obstructing traffic. Inez Milholland rode a dazzling white horse at the front of the parade, carrying a banner which read “Forward into the light”. It appears that over 100 years after Austen that women were actually given a voice, and they used the art of spectacle to manage that. Finally, a marginalized group was allowed to speak using a language that the populace could understand. 

There is a clear distinction between the characters of Baliardo and Catherine in these two works. Baliardo uses Enlightenment principles/tools in the wrong way and crosses the lines of privacy in the process. In his case (and in Behn’s), what is highlighted is the misuse of enlightened thought; how the enlightenment principles can and should be regulated. Catherine is chastised for not using Enlightenment thought whatsoever, yet still she comes up with the right answers. There is a distinction though out that isn’t widely recognized: the issue of mind vs. body. Ownership over one’s body in space is given a prime role in both of these works. The complicating factor lies in that, in the case of Baliardo, he is transgressing bodily, private space whereas with Catherine she is prevented from entering an empty space with her body, and so her person and body are ejected from that space in the end. Baliardo is exposed, and Catherine isn’t given ownership even over her own body. Behn locates the light of spectacle, exposes Baliardo and the audience for foolishness in believing propaganda through spectacle, whereas when the same thing is accused of Catherine, she is in the end redeemed for uncovering the truth.

              Both Behn and Austen redeem truth through the concept of bodily ownership. They both expose hermeneutical injustice. In the case of Behn, if the person being peeped on cannot speak of the violation, then they are in a lower, powerless position. In the case of Catherine, if the person unchaperoned is thrown out into the wild landscape in the middle of the night in a public coach, then they have had their bodily ownership removed.  In the case of women’s suffrage, if women show up to get their voices heard through pageantry, then subsequently obtain physical and verbal abuse with attempts to bodily eject them, then it is clear that bodily ownership was something that long needed to be questioned and rightly fought for through writing and any other means available. It is only through spectacle in many cases, that truth will be found and known widely.

 

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Wednesday, March 9, 2022

The Voice of Water


 Aphrodite Rising: Life at the Margins and the Watery Realm in 1890’s American                                                        Literature

Introduction

 

“According to the newspapers, the convention had been “an open violation of common decency-the association of black and white-male and female.”

Holly Jackson, on the Pennsylvania Hall Fire of 1838.

 

A dialectical Hegelian thought process is at the center of Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk- the integration of opposites, the liminal space between polarities.  The eventful moment in 1838 was the culmination of the resistance to the quelling of polarities that had been happening in American political and cultural life:  the grand lecture hall in Philadelphia was burned to the ground. Abolitionists had raised funds to build the building, and a convention of antislavery women was held there and even despite threats, “the women took the podium anyway.” The women had been screamed at and “white and black women linked arms as they left the hall that night, a show of solidarity in case the women of color were singled out for especially violent attacks.” (Jackson 73-4) The crowd burst in later with axes and torched the building. When firemen arrived, they saved only the surrounding buildings from the flames. The antislavery women were blamed for the danger and the destruction in the end. An article in the Philadelphia Gazette “celebrates the firemen for sharing the feelings of the crowd and not allowing one drop of water to fall on the burning building.” (Jackson 76) The ire of the mobs was not put out by the water. Like the fire that ripped through those buildings, the anger fed on itself and used misplaced blame to counter their unrecognized shame. It spread like wildfire, and violence and hatred became the core of the crowd, meaning that it became the norm. If this norm was contested, the protestor(s) would be shut down.

If water had been used liberally as it should have, the polarities would have reached the point of synthesis. Unfortunately, this did not happen that way, and decades later would prove that this imbalance had a profound effect on how the country would recover from the Civil War that would enfold shortly after: North vs. South. What is important here is to note that this event had occurred in the North. Incidentally, Frederick Douglas escaped slavery in New York in the year 1838 (not one year later). He would subsequently be troubled by ejection multiple times from train cars (Jim Crow car) as he insisted that it was unfair to be forced to sit in lesser conditions due to his color. He kept trying to forcibly quell the polarity, however.

            What is it about water and liminal “grey” spaces that feel like home to marginalized people? Why does Dubois turn to water in his text, from the outset? Why does Edna lose herself without struggle into the water at the end of The Awakening? The answer may lie within what water means to us as a symbol, and perhaps it could mean that in water we are one with our bodies. No one can “own” us there.  Even those who were speaking out against slavery could not “own” a building that they had paid for and constructed on their own. It was left to burn even though it could have been saved. Could the emphasis on water be part of the polarity of fire/destruction vs. water/healing/recovery? Could Edna too have been saved by the water? Had she herself “synthesized” the polarities present in her own life, could she have managed to quell the hopelessness that she felt at the end of the novel?

            There is a long tradition of linking water with renewal or baptism, rebirth, and the imagination. We could also move even further into water being the realm of the erotic. We enter into this world through water, and we learn early on that this is a safe place full of security and fulfillment of our needs. Aphrodite/Venus was birthed in the water. Goddess of love and beauty came into being through the alchemy of the liquid realm. We learn through Greek myths that it is the sirens that sing calling the sailors into their watery world; songs also being the realm of the liquid. Water is filled with mystery, the feminine, emotion, the unknown, nurturing, guidance, darkness, a muffling of/escape from sound, and a letting go. If you struggle too much in the water, you could drown. It is better to just float. Water is both safety and danger, at once. A Hegelian dance. Water could have saved that burning building in 1838, yet control was taken over the water, in the end, in the name of justice.

Dubois: Songs, the Water, and Escape.

            Dubois’ concept known as “double consciousness” illustrates this idea of the liminal space. The Black slave cannot escape from the eyes watching and assessing his actions therefore leading to his/her own self-assessment continuously, analogous to the idea that slaves could not escape surveillance and punishment over pretty much anything that they would do. Dubois begins his first chapter called “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” with a song by Arthur Symons:

O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,

All night long crying with a mournful cry,

As I lie and listen, and cannot understand

The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,

O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?

All night long the water is crying to me.

 

Unresting water, there shall never be rest

Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail

And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west,

And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,

All life long crying without avail,

As the water all night long is crying to me. (Dubois 1)

 

Dubois continues on to say, “Between me and the other world, there is an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of framing it.” They don’t ask directly, “How does it feel to be a problem?”” (Dubois 1) But this remains unsaid and in the air as a presence through every conversation. Dubois juxtaposes this idea with the entrance poem to show the idea of grief that lies within the watery realm of silence. He uses an apostrophe to start his work, and water is addressed as something that could have the capacity to understand his feelings. The second stanza gives a clue to “why water?” because he sees it as ever present and unending. The rhythms of water continue on indefinitely and can be relied upon to do so. As we cry when we are sad, so water cries in turn. So, for Dubois, to give water his sadness and grief not only will water understand, but water will echo his sadness. He will feel the rhythm of it, like a song, and he pairs this poem with sheet music below it. Unlike when he has a conversation with a white person and the guilt comes up or what is truly important (feelings) go unaddressed, so water can be relied upon to not ignore. The act of creating music is a way through the silence. And to address the water through a song is to make spoken this need. Emotions and water are linked. Grief is an emotion. Sadness creates tears.

            Dubois’ dominant metaphor for the entire work is that of the veil, the ever-present partition that separates African Americans from the world around them, and in doing so separates them from themselves as well.” (Neilson 107) Water could also represent the only place or one of the only places that an individual can escape this veil, as they needed to do during times of slavery. Wilderness and swamps were typical places where slaves would congregate and evade the watching eyes of their masters and overseers. Dubois continuously turns to the sorrow songs in his work which could mean that he is using the songs to create a veil between others who would not understand not only the textual connotations, but the music. He includes sheet music in his text which not everyone would know how to read. These songs create a shield so that they could in freedom express themselves and commune together. “American slaves suffered an extraordinary amount of interference in their daily lives.” (Neilson 108) They had so many rules placed on them, some they weren’t even made aware of, so to consider how oppressive this was, one only has to understand that any motion or sound one makes could be scrutinized or punished leaving their indecipherable markings on their flesh, creating “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Neilson 108). The surveillance of the masters was similar to Foucault’s panopticon; the slaves would not know when or if they were being watched. So, slaves were forced to meet and engage secretly in order to evade “the eyes”:

In many cases the slaves sang and worshipped in secret, often late at night or very early in the morning when their masters were asleep and when the cloak of darkness would most likely shield them from the prowling patrollers.” (Neilson 111)

 

So, any place where they could find an empty spot that wasn’t being watched became their sanctuary, and this is where slave spirituals began. In essence, these were sung in spaces that were liminal and untouched. Virginal, safe spaces. Song was prevented from being heard by establishing either pots of water in the center of the gathering or wetting clothes and cloaking the space in these. The longing that they felt was recorded in their songs, songs that would not be overheard by the wrong party.

So, “How does it feel to be a problem?”. The slaves would express how this feels, and Dubois when he wrote his book made sure that using the language of slavery and this ever-present reliable water that he would be heard. He put these songs next to poetry from the Anglo-Saxon tradition to make this clear.

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second-sight in this American world-a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” (Dubois 2)

His experience is second hand experience. Is it any wonder that Dubois focuses on the liminal and the dialectic of opposites in his work? Is it also any wonder that music was the way through for many?

            Dubois did not appreciate this idea of favoring the “white” of Progress, erasing the “black” of the ambiguous past, what is seen as unacceptable needing to be destroyed. To Dubois, a reconciliation needs to happen, not an erasure. A combining of the two was necessary.  “My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.” (Dubois 43) He moves into sorrow as his narration continues, and he emphasizes twilight and dawn as he laments these changes:

“How shall man measure Progress there where the dark faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure-is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day? Thus, sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.” (Dubois 45)

 

Dubois enters the liminal, ambiguous space between past and future, hope and despair, and a lack of certainty in order to attempt to find the answers to the questions. He is assessing what Reconstruction has done to the cause and the perception of Blacks in society, lamenting the errors made through so much struggle and resistance. He asks: “Well, then what for?” as an echo to ”How does it feel to be a problem?” If they could not voice this simple phrase, or have it asked of them, what was the war for if it would result in such uncertainty?

            What follows next in Chapter V is the metaphor of Atlanta and the idea that all-black and

white- are rising together. This next chapter shows us his hope, but first he must accept despair.

“It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong , something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and the best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have found in its excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.”  (Dubois 48)

 

Dubois sees clearly that the uncertainty is the result of, not the triumph of Good, but the resulting mixture of consequence: with the good, there resulted so much bad. The polarity of this realization is what led him to the water and the liminal. Only by reconciling these paradoxes could he find a solution. Only by creating a voice that both could and would be heard could they be acknowledged.

Chopin and Aphrodite’s Rise from the Foam

 

Chopin’s novel The Awakening brings us a different perspective of what water can do for us and what water means. Does it give us our bodily ownership back, or does it take it away? Chopin presents us with another paradox, which of course could go either way. Michelle Burnbaum argues that Edna never regained her agency. She only allowed “alien hands” to give her sensuality and the erotic. While maintaining a liminal position, Edna does not acknowledge her innate power over those who she attempts to connect with in the story. Burnbaum writes:

“Alternately awake and asleep-sovereign and subjugated-Chopin’s heroine enacts the paradox of the imperial self who appears to rule while being herself ruled. The unbearable contradictions of being both free agent and yet acted upon is characteristic of the colonizer’s position. And as the myth of self-authorization must involve the erasure of its own authorizing principle, so must Edna repress that which is both the basis for and a threat to her autonomy.” (Burnbaum 303)

 

While Burnbaum’s argument does have merit and would be useful when focused on the marginalized characters in this work and their struggles, what is not acknowledged here is that the colonized would be seeing Edna from their own perspective, not understanding “how it feels to be her” or “How it feels to be a problem?”, not realizing that to be in her shoes they would see that she is also marginalized and so, was looking for a place to belong. The clue is who does she choose to cling to for assurance and belonging? All the non-White characters. Instead of seeing her as a colonizer using people who are below her on the social hierarchy, we could alternatively see her as trying to disregard the unfair and superficial hierarchy that needs to be broken up. Edna could see the truth that it is the relationships that we foster that matter, not an imposed hierarchical structure to give us how we are supposed to behave. What hurt Edna at the end is her realization that her influence was not enough to change things, and would not. Her entrance into the water was her surrender. The relationships that she had formed were too fragile to withstand that structure of power and forced exclusion from not only social space, but even through our own feelings and bonds.

            Sandra Gilbert has referred to Edna as a “mythic metamorphosis” (Gilbert 55), akin to a female Jesus:

“For in creating a heroine as free and golden as Aphrodite, a “regal woman” who “stands alone” and gives herself where she “pleases”, Chopin was exploring a vein of revisionary mythology allied not only to the revisionary erotics of free love advocates like Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman but also to the feminist theology of women like Florence Nightingale, who believed that the next Christ might be a “female Christ”. (Gilbert 61)

 

Could it be the only way out for Edna was through death or surrender? It appears to be that way, and the attitude towards race in this novel would only give a partial answer to this question. She did everything right (except for leaving her children which is a different debate and not without cause). She attempted to wrench herself away from the structure she was confined within, the cage of the home was opened up, and it is important to note that it was the male presence in the novel that allowed for her rise out of confinement:

“After Mrs. Pontellier had danced twice with her husband, once with Robert, and once with Monsieur Ratignolle, who was thin and tall and swayed like a reed in the wind when he danced, she went out on the gallery and seated herself on the low window-sill, where she commanded a view of all that went on in the hall and could look out toward the Gulf. There was a soft effulgence in the east. The moon was coming up, and its mystic shimmer was casting a million lights across the distant, restless water.” (Chopin 32)

In the text, this is the pivotal and quite liminal point where she becomes Aphrodite. She “commands” the view over everything. She has multiple men dancing with her. She shows a strong presence over the restless water. Here we see her at her best; where she should have remained had she been simply the figure of Aphrodite. It was her fluctuating emotion that changed things, and the changing tide of societal attitude towards such a strong woman, among even those women who would be most likely to understand her dilemma.  Eventually, she reached the “point of no return”, and like a figure such as Anna Karenina, she couldn’t come back to shore. The best way to assess what this could mean in the scope of water imagery and the liminal is to compare it to Dubois and his use of water as an apostrophe.

 Only water understands. Water is a part of grief and of the emotional, imaginative realm of fantasy and nostalgia for a lost past. It doesn’t really matter if those fantasies or nostalgia had actually existed; they are still very real in the mind of the person who is calling them forth. The slaves found a safe space and used water to increase the safety, and they did it communally, together. Edna is very different. She is utterly alone, so that when she enters the water, she is not safe. She cannot, like Aphrodite, ride the foam because she has surrendered to the water. In a sense, Gilbert is correct when she claims Edna is a Jesus figure, but I don’t think this goes far enough. Gilbert describes Aphrodite as:

“Naked yet immortal, she moves with ease and grace between the natural and the super natural, the human and the inhuman, nature and culture. Golden and decked in gold, she is associated with sunset and sunrise, the liminal hours of transformative consciousness-the entranced hours of awakening and drowsing-that mediate between night and day, dream and reality.” (Gilbert 62)

 

Dubois also talked of twilight and dawn just the same: that liminal realm between the polarity of opposing sides. However, he brings it up as if to say: not all is dark and not all is light. Progress doesn’t mean embracing only the light, but understanding the darkness and accepting it. This is something that Edna fails to do. She wishes to go back to an untouched, virginal past of childhood in order to not accept the darkness. If she had accepted the darkness, she would have become the liminal Aphrodite. The goddess who has agency to change the world of mortal men. Casting herself in the sea was certainly not goddess-like. It may have been Jesus like, and yes, her death paves the way for the New Woman, but it also shows her downfall.  Edna had escaped from the cage and could act in the world with freedom. She had gained that. What she couldn’t do was accept reality.

“It was no coincidence, after all, that Kate Chopin imagined her Venus rising from the foam of a ceremonial dinner party in 1899, the same year that another American artist, Isadora Duncan, was beginning to dance the dances of Aphrodite in London salons…Within a few years, Duncan, haunted by her own birth “under the star of Aphrodite” was to sit for days before the Primavera, the famous painting of Botticelli.” (Gilbert 63)

 

Edna had enthroned herself at the dinner table in gold satin at one point in the novel, but we see this also contrasted with scenes of drowsiness and sleep and wakefulness in a large white bed.  It is crystal clear that Edna had become a mortal version of Aphrodite, but perhaps this is what Chopin is trying to tell us: that Aphrodite is not mortal. Edna could lose her life. Both Dubois and Chopin hit on something very important: how treacherous it was to live in times like these where an entire building could be left to burn, and a woman cast into the sea would not even be noticed. It is a forgetfulness, an ignorance, a casting aside of those who do not belong.

            The liminal was dangerous and uncertain, but it was much preferable to the real and the open and the light, as we see by what happened during the fire of Philadelphia Hall. There is a long tradition of depictions of Aphrodite in the art world, so it is striking to note that during the 1890’s we see depictions in other forms of art. Sandro Botticelli had been forgotten about in the annals of art history until around 1858: “intelligent artistic circles in England were aware of Botticelli at least by 1858, when Lady Eastlake, herself almost suspiciously a la mode in such things, warns a friend about to visit Italy to “try and fill your heart especially with grandeur and earnestness of the great four” quattrocento Florentine figures of whom Botticelli is first.” (Levey 295) His art before that was seen as obscure and of lesser importance, almost odd in appearance. But that was changing in the late 19th century. “In the early 1860’s Burne-Jones’s own vehement love of Botticelli was still something unusual. Nevertheless, by then the public was aware of Botticelli’s existence and his work was being collected. (Levey 299)….But there were serious obstacles to appreciation. There remained unexplained obscurities of subject matter and a violence of emotion which was disturbing, even an ambivalence in the artist’s attitude to what he painted.”(Levey 301) Is it possible that what was being rejected was the liminal and the grey areas that his works seem to call forth? Could this also be the reason why in the 1890’s America, we are seeing literary works calling forth the liminal and therefore calling forth Aphrodite subconsciously in the process? What fears us also drives us forward, and Dubois has pinpointed that fear and the result. William Morris and William Stanhope had both been fascinated by Venus and explored her both in their work and in the admiration they showed for earlier works by Botticelli of Flora and Births of Venus. It was “still a rather esoteric enthusiasm in 1870s” (Poe 56), but at the same time when ideas and paradigms are being called forth, this is done slowly and in a small way without knowledge until later when the trend has almost passed. Lorenzo Medici, patron of Sandro Botticelli had wished for the “Tuscan tongue” to become something “never again be scorned as being poorly ornamented and lacking in richness.” (Dempsey 3), so suffice it to say that Dubois’ use of slave songs in his work was in an analogous way attempting to approach the same formalization in order to raise the level of the art he wished to emphasize. One could argue that both Lorenzo de Medici and W.E.B. Dubois were successful in their efforts, Florentine art and culture becoming high art, and Black culture and music becoming pivotal to the growth of American music and pop culture. And it was through the metaphorical rise of Aphrodite and the liminal that we can track this progress happening. The attachment and attraction to Botticelli tracks the level of change as the idea of the New Woman and The Decadent rise from the foam to the surface. The polarities were now realized, so the paradox could be resolved.

 

Conclusion: The Rise of the New Woman and Black American Culture.

“Eros is what moves us to make connections and therefore leads to the common good: it is the power, the yearning, the hunger, the drive, the YES to the breakdown of the walls that separate person from person, creature from creature, creature from creator; and to the making of the connections between and among us in which we find our common good,” (Hall 96)

 

Cheryl Hall argues convincingly in her book The Trouble with Passion: Political Theory Beyond the Reign of Reason that it is through the erotic that one could resist oppression. Chopin’s novel could have been an example of this had Edna embraced the erotic for what it is: true, singular desire for what is real and a taking ownership of the body through these desires. However, she didn’t remain in the erotic world. She left only to be taken in by the world of illusion and nostalgia that the water her forced her into in the end. We could make an even further argument by saying that it is in this novel that we see the unresolvable paradox of desire vs. illusion, or body vs. fantasy. We wonder what would have happened had she stayed, but that is not important considering when the work was published and what was possible for women at the time, holding profound significance for what was at stake toward the end of the nineteenth century. As Linda Dowling writes:

“When they described their lurid vision of cultural apocalypse, critics of the “New” inevitably adopted what had become a familiar journalistic vocabulary of crisis. Invoking the analogy of the French Revolution, for instance, had by the 1890’s become an almost reflexive rhetorical gesture among journalistic writers, one merely signaling a writer’s urgent dismay or his sense of inevitable, inevitably disastrous consequences. “ (Dowling 437)

 

Given this prevailing atmosphere of crisis, it is no wonder that writers were writing on the line of the liminal. When there is an upheaval in any area there is always this uncertainty present. What we do with this uncertainty had to ability to promote change for either the better or the worse.

“If we smile at the repeated warnings of apocalypse made by critics of the New Woman and the decadent, we nonetheless recognize in their apocalyptic vocabulary a genuinely anguished expression of cultural anxiety, a sense that the new might betoken cultural changes even less comprehensible than those which the constantly recurring images of decline, decay, and end were meant to control.” (Dowling 438)

 

In other words, they were seeing it as a sign that things were about to go downhill very fast. Linda Dowling also brings up in her essay how those heroines of the New Woman Movement consorted with those of the “other “unsavory lower classes”: lower class people and especially the male of the lower classes. Not only did they want to rewrite social imbalances through their cause, but usually this descent was appealing because it represented the simplicity that they cannot re-gain in their lives (just as Edna fantasized about going back to her childhood in her last moments), temporary and was only a brief stint on the journey towards greater sense of self.  (Dowling 442-3) What Dowling does not address, however, is the idea that through the melding of class, this New Woman could create a new category for herself without throwing out what was good in the old system. Not only that, women were able to achieve the sense of the erotic that they could not achieve within high culture and its overly formal system of restrictions. In essence, by creating these connections they were attempting to do what Edna had begun: transgress the unbroken liminality of the age:  to finally break the system that was not working without causing destruction in the process.

            Isn’t that in essence what Dubois was also attempting in his Souls of Black Folk?  “How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!”  Why should we forget where we come from (nature, home, roots, the pastoral) through the univocal cause of Progress? That paradox needed to be resolved. Forgetting half of the polarity would be exactly what would lead to despair and eventual destruction. Dubois taught us that. So did Chopin. We cannot embrace only one side of a duality, so we either stay within the liminal or combine the two together to create something completely brand new.

            As Dubois had combined two sides throughout his work (music vs. poems, and moments of simplicity vs. higher thought/reason), so did American culture continue on to resolve those paradoxes presented to us in the 1890’s: African Americans would continue into the future to change the landscape of music through song, stories, and spirituality, and women would rise like Aphrodite to give strength to a whole new generation of women with voices that demanded to be heard and accepted as part of the whole.

Both Black Americans and American women had reclaimed their bodies in the end and would write their own language into the integral American story of the future.

 

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